Bury the Children in the Yard (2 page)

“As I’ll ever be.”

They collected their things and headed out to the truck, locking the door behind them and stowing the key on a narrow ledge running just under the roof of the porch. Dump glanced at his watch. Just now four o’clock. They were finished early and he guessed that made it an okay day. As always, they would fudge their timesheets, probably putting down that they were out at five, and that almost made up for losing out on the tip.

“You wanna come back to my place, hang out for a bit?” Leggy asked.

Dump didn’t really want to do that. He was kind of mad at Leggy but the alternative was to go back to his crappy apartment and listen to the wild children on one side of him yell and scream and the wild newlyweds on the other side of him fight for a few hours and then fuck each other’s brains out for about ten minutes before they started fighting again. At least, he figured, Leggy would have some booze.

“Sure,” Dump said, rolling the window down on the old truck as they wound out of Ms. Blanchette’s neighborhood.

Somehow, Leggy had managed to save enough money to buy a couple of acres out in the country. Of course, that took all of his savings and the only thing he could afford to put on the land was a trailer. A
used
trailer at that. But out so far from the town limits nobody really gave a damn how it looked. Leggy didn’t mind a little rust. As long as the inside was dry in the rain and warm in the winter.

Once at the trailer, they left their cleaning supplies to go inside and start in on some grape Mad Dog and a case of Natty Light. Leggy had a big screen TV and a satellite hookup and Dump watched a baseball pre-game. The Reds were playing the Pirates and he thought to himself what a godawful boring sport baseball was. Leggy continued to occupy himself with the dark brown book.

Leggy, entering the first stages of drunkenness, had started to repeat himself. “This book makes me real mad.”

“Why?” Dump said, polishing off the last of the Mad Dog and cracking open another beer, a happy haze finally starting in his brain.

“I dunno. I guess books just make me mad. I don’t see no point in em.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“I mean, when you go to school they always tell you how you should read read read ... Well, I been outta school a long time and I can’t see where readin benefits nobody. Too much like work. And this here book. I don’t understand. I don’t think it’s one of them photography books cause their ain’t no captions or credits or nothin.”

All in all, Dump was getting pretty fucking tired of hearing about the book.

“If you hate it so much why you keep lookin at it?”

“Cause I don’t get it. There must be somethin special about it.”

“Why you say that?” Dump downed his beer in three large gulps. Leggy’s trailer was kind of warm and he could tell his stink had busted open again.

“Cause she had it all locked up. Had all of em locked up.”

“I guess. Not many people lock up books, do they?”

“None that I know of. Of course, most people I know only own the Bible.”

“The bestselling book of all time.”

“The biggest piece of shit of all of them.”

“Ain’t never read it.”

“Christ. You stink to high heaven.”

“Sorry.”

“Let’s go out to the dirt pile. Let this place air out some.”

“Game’s gettin ready to start.”

“You hate baseball.”

“Guess you’re right about that.”

Dump stood up from the raggedy brown chair he had chosen to pollute, a little wobbly at first. Leggy crossed the small trailer and went into the back. Dump figured he was just going back to use the bathroom but when he came back into the living room he was carrying his shotgun.

“What’s with the gun?” Dump asked.

“I’m gonna have me some fun with this book.”

“Gonna shoot it?”

“Damn right I’m gonna shoot it.”

“Cool.” Dump no longer gave a damn about the moral implications of stealing something Ms. Blanchette undoubtedly treasured.

Together, Leggy carrying the book and the shotgun, Dump carrying the half empty case of beer, they went out to the dirt mound, which was pretty much just that – a big mound of dirt, about six feet high and fifteen feet long. Neither of them really knew why it was there and neither of them really cared. They both liked to come out and fire off Leggy’s arsenal from time to time and the dirt mound made a most excellent backstop.

Leggy opened the book up and placed it into some loose dirt on the mound.

“I’ll fire one and then you can fire one, kay?”

“Sure.” Dump cracked open another beer. He was about ready to piss his pants and wished he had used the toilet before coming out.

Leggy counted off about twenty paces and smiled. Some of the wax had sweated out of his mustache and it drooped a little bit. “Fuckin book.” He pulled the trigger and Dump watched as bits of paper flew up from the book as the buckshot ripped into it. Leggy yipped and raised the rifle up in the air. Score one for the illiterates, Dump thought, and then said, “My turn.”

“Get it right in the middle and we’ll split that fucker in half,” Leggy said.

“I’ll try.” When Dump looked through the sight, he saw two books and decided to aim for the one on the left.

The deafening roar of the shotgun threatened to split his skull but the effect was satisfying. The book didn’t come completely apart but a large hole had opened in the middle.

Dump handed the gun back to Leggy. “You gonna give it another go.”

Leggy was now so drunk he had to hold his left eye open. He chose to do this with the end of the gun while he patted himself down with his free hand. “Shit,” he said. “I didn’t bring no more shells.”

Dump staggered up to the mound, pulling his penis out of his dirty jeans. Once he got within pissing distance, he let go with a stream of rancid urine. It soaked the pages of the book.

“Shit, man,” Leggy said. “I can smell that all the way back here. Don’t make me blow your dick off.” He aimed the unloaded gun at Dump. It still made Dump nervous.

They took the rest of the beer and the gun into the trailer and waited for dark. Destroying the book seemed to have taken both of their minds off it. They watched the baseball game, drank more, and played some cards. Eventually, after all the beer was gone, Dump decided he wanted to go back to the apartment. The truck was a company truck both of them used to do most of their driving. As long as it showed back up at Leggy’s house in the morning to pick him up, he didn’t really care where it went.

Leggy had fallen into something like a stupor on the couch. Dump didn’t know how but he knew Leggy would be just as well-coiffed and crazy-eyed at nine o’clock in the morning as he had been earlier. Dump would be dragging. He didn’t like to get this drunk through the week, on work nights, but sometimes there just wasn’t anything else to do.

As he walked toward the truck, something caught his eye. Movement. Over by the dirt mound. His first crazy thought was that fucking book had some kind of tracking device in it and now the police had come to claim it. He thought about just hightailing it to the truck and driving away as fast as possible but he was too drunk to follow what could be considered the path of reason.

Drawing closer to the dirt pile, he saw the book had fallen down off its little ledge of soil.

And it seemed to be crossing the ground on its own.

Dump stopped there. That was some freaky shit. If the book was crawling now, he didn’t want to be anywhere near it.

Then he noticed the book wasn’t moving on its own. It was ...
attached
to a figure.

Dump’s heart began a hard thud in his weighty chest.

He moved closer to the book. The reason he couldn’t see the figure so well at first was because it was covered in blood.

Now he was maybe ten feet away. He didn’t know if he should move any closer to the figure, mainly because of the sheer oddity of the situation. But what harm could it do? It seemed to be pulling itself along the ground. And he had to know who it was. Because if his suspicions were correct then he would have to seriously reevaluate his reality.

The figure let out a garbled wheeze.

Besides, Dump thought, moving closer, what if this person needs help? He couldn’t just turn and leave them. He wouldn’t do that to anyone.

Now he was only a couple of steps away, looking down at the shattered and bloody face of Ms. Blanchette. Her body was riddled with buckshot. She reached toward him. Dump thought of something like a nuclear bomb, opening up some other world, ripping everyone up, turning them all into a shadow of this mutilated Ms. Blanchette.

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” she said. “You have to stop him.” Her head dropped down, nearly hitting the grass.

“Stop who?” Dump asked.

“
Him
.”

“I think maybe I need to get you to a hospital.” He said this knowing that a hospital wouldn’t do any good. No doctor was good enough to patch up all those holes. And how would he explain this to the hospital staff. True, maybe they had shot her but she was a
book
when they shot her. Just a fucking book.

“Close it,” she coughed up at him, dying madness in her eyes. “Please, let me die at home. Close it.”

Dump reached down, the hole was opened as far as it could be. He didn’t see how it was possible, didn’t know how she would fit in the book, but he closed it anyway. And Ms. Blanchette was gone. He held the book in his right hand, not minding that there wasn’t much of it to hold or that he had urinated on it only a couple of hours ago. It deserved better than to just be buried in a pile of dirt. Standing there, he realized he could very well be holding some kind of apocalypse.

He started back toward the trailer. He would have to wake Leggy up and tell him about this. He didn’t know how he would take it. Since he hadn’t actually
seen
Ms. Blanchette, half-in and half-out of the book, he probably wouldn’t believe him at all.

Dump opened the door to the trailer.

Leggy was not at all how he had left him.

He was changed.

His legs were still very long but he had more of them. They bent from his torso, all six of them, like the fattest spider legs Dump had ever seen. His eyes had changed. They were silvery and slanted, reaching back nearly to his ears. And now his handlebar mustache was curved downward and looked more like fangs.

In front of him was the black book. The bastard had taken it after all. Had probably, in fact, known about the import of those books far longer than he had let on. For all Dump knew – and judging by what he now witnessed – Leggy wasn’t human at all.

Briefly, watching this weird spiderthing in front of him, Dump thought back over all the years he had known Leggy. Curiously, he found himself thinking about all the stuff Leggy
hadn’t
told him. He could spout philosophies, ideas, and opinions but he never talked about the good old days, the school days, the teenage years – the things most of their blue collar ilk talked about.

“Leggy,” Dump said. He wished he had his gun. He wouldn’t hesitate to put some bullets into this snarling thing in front of him.

Leggy didn’t seem to hear Dump. He looked at the open book beneath him and Dump’s eyes strayed in the same direction. The picture there was spread across two pages and looked very dark. Dump thought he saw other things, things like Leggy and some maybe even worse, flit across the pages. Leggy lowered his head and began squirming into the book. Shocked, Dump looked on, not knowing what else to do. He dropped the book he held in his hand onto the couch, picked up the shotgun that had been drunkenly tossed aside and went toward the back of the trailer.

In Leggy’s bedroom was a strange smell. One Dump did not like at all. It was far worse than Dump usually smelled, even on his worst day. And there were pictures plastered on all the walls. Alien pictures. Pictures of things Dump could easily imagine existing in the pages of Ms. Blanchette’s library. For all Dump knew, these pictures could have come from the books in Ms. Blanchette’s library.

Dump rummaged through drawers until he found what he was looking for. The bright red plastic shells. He split the gun and put in two shells, heading back to the living room. Just as he entered, he saw the last of Leggy, heading into the black book, a toothed tail dragging along the worn down carpet.

Dump didn’t hesitate. Maybe he had had enough of this world. Maybe he just couldn’t stand the thought of that spider creature being loosed on some other world. Maybe it was the guilt at having aided in the theft and destruction of the other book. Maybe he had always hated Leggy. Picking up that other book and holding it in his free hand, Dump jumped into the black book after Leggy, having no idea what he would find on the other side.

Music from the Slaughterhouse

The midday sun continued to burn the already brown grass in the meadow. It was the hottest, driest summer Jakob could remember. Marcie, his younger sister by two years, sat next to him under a shady crabapple tree. Together, they stared across the field at the slaughterhouse. It was owned by their neighbor, Sully Bussard. Any breeze blown from the direction of the slaughterhouse was tainted. Especially in this heat. It smelled like meat gone bad and made Jakob think about what happened in there. Maybe it was a blessing that, today, the breeze was nonexistent.

“I don’t like that place much,” Marcie said.

“Me neither,” Jakob said.

Marcie had brought her sketchpad out. She had completed her first year of high school where she had taken an art class and been absolutely consumed with her drawings and painting ever since. She sketched quickly with her left hand, holding the big sketchpad in her smaller right hand. Jakob didn’t think anything of that hand’s size deficiency until she actively used it. It looked strange. He tried to think of the word ...
Anomaly
. That was the word he was thinking of. The hand looked totally out of place. It was the hand of a six-year-old girl.

“That’s a good drawing,” he said.

“Thanks.”

He had almost forgotten why he had come out here. Then he remembered. Marcie’s friend, Geneva Kaufman. He wanted to try and get Marcie to see if she liked him. He was seventeen and desperate and didn’t see anything wrong with using his sister as a pimp.